Which Dr. King will we honor and learn from this year: Will it be the agreeable, safe King that calls for service and nominal equality – or will it be the radical, fierce King who calls for questioning what he called the triple evils of capitalism, racism and militarism?
As we mark Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, we see the ways his dream is ignored and misappropriated, reaffirming how often we will do anything to not feel discomfort. But what about his deeper dream of the “beloved community” that was anti-militarist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and rooted in love?
Modernity includes those pillars of capitalism, militarism, and racism. But it also includes the harmful legacies, now global in scale, that include hyper-individualism, separations of all sorts (including disconnection from nature, spirit, community), binaries of all sorts (including mind-body split & gender), and supremicisms of all sorts, including white body supremacy and human supremacy.
These are systems we both inherited and continue to perpetuate. They are ultimately bankrupt and harmful systems for EVERYONE, chockful of values, habits, and ways of being sourced in intended trauma.
When we allow ourselves to fully know what healing requires, what ecotherapy invites, and what steering our collective ship in this Great Turning could mean in its broadest application, we know in our bones it requires the type of uncompromising questioning of systems that Dr. King practiced. That the most ecological thing we can do is to compost White Modernity’s Empire.
Part of the composting is explicitly naming the systems, dismantling our inherited allegiances, and re-rooting in deeper ecospiritual identities that support the health, integrity, and flourishing of all, respecting the deep relationality at the heart of reality, which is the premise behind everything Wild Nature Heart is here to do.
Whiteness and domination and extractivism are unrelenting, but so are the longings—so beautifully modeled by Dr. King—to dismantle the big lies of separation and supremacy.
To touch the wounds at the root of white colonial modernity is part of our calling. This is a deep ecology calling. This is earth dreaming through us, through our minds, hearts, and bodies. May we open ourselves up to it.